Apple has brought on another veteran gaming expert to help develop their App Store. Robin Burrowes, a former marketing manager over at Microsoft and Xbox will be a major addition to the App Store and gaming focus for Apple. In Burrowes’ his time at Xbox he was in charge of Xbox live for the UK, playing a major role in the dashboard update last year as he attended several conferences all over the globe. His seven years of experience working for Xbox and Xbox Live should be a big addition to the gaming aspect of the App Store.

His previous time working on Xbox materials are likely to phase into new ideas involved with the App Store in general and with its games. This comes at a time when the App Store and Apple’s products are hitting a new height in popularity. Their new products have been successful for years, but the dropping prices in refurbished iPhone- and iPad-models have brought the older versions of their products into even more homes. Read the rest of this entry »

I thought this level of graphics was reserved for PCs only. I was wrong. With Touchgrind BMX, Illusion Labs AB has taken iPhone gaming to a whole new dimension. The level of detail is remarkable, and the smoothness even more so. I have found similar performance-demanding apps to occasionally stutter and slow down my phone’s OS after playing, but with Touchgrind BMX I have experienced no such problems… even on my measly iPhone 3GS. Gamers using the iPhone 4 with its faster processor should have no trouble whatsoever. Read the rest of this entry »

The creativity behind this game is truly inspirational. Where do people think of such great ideas like this? It’s such a good concept and I wish I had thought of it first… but credit is given where it’s due to Launching Pad Games for an exciting and more importantly FUN game, which is how games on the iPhone should be.

Ahhh, Reversi; it’s such a simple concept, yet has become so popular. And with Reversi Reloaded, you can now play this classic game on the move with your iPhone or iPad. Before I installed the game, my first concern for it was space – the iPhone does not have a lot to offer in terms of screen space, and when I started my first Reversi game, the squares were indeed quite small. Despite this, however, I had absolutely no trouble selecting the correct boxes… so kudos to Mobivention for making this typical board game work with the iPhone’s limiting factors.

MacRumors is reporting that Apple is giving the opportunity to developers to give out up to 50 promotional compies of their iPhone and iPod Touch apps. With these codes, recipients can download a full copy of the application for free. This feature is currently only available for the US iTunes Store. This will allow developers to distribute review copies of their new games to sites like iPwnGames more efficiently.

A lot of developers were complaining about the review policy of the App Store, and today Apple has finally made a big improvement. Since today you can only review an App when you’ve actually purchased it. It’s no longer possible to go to an App and just review it even though you haven’t used it. Developers were seeing negative reviews of people who hadn’t even played an App. TUAW has more info on the new review policy:

The frequent result is as you might expect: 100 reviews kvetching about price by people who never even purchased the application. That isn’t fair to developers, and it isn’t fair to potential buyers.

iPwnGames is off course the number 1 place to find out what new games are available in the App Store, but now there’s also an App that lets you know what new games are available in the App Store. GotApps allows you to create email alerts for certain keywords and categories, so you can simply create an alert for the games category and get an alert whenever a new game is out.

The Wall Street Journal recently had an interview with Apple’s Steve Jobs. He told WSJ that users have downloaded more than 60 million applications from the App Store in the first month. Most of these apps were free, but the total of sales so far was $30 million in the first month, so that makes an average of $1 million a day. Games account for more than 25% of all sales with 300,000 sales of SEGA’s Super Monkey Ball in the first 20 days. 300,000 times Super Monkey Ball priced at $9.99 gives SEGA a nice $3 million in sales so far.

“That’s a substantial business,” says Simon Jeffery, president of Sega’s U.S. division. “It gives iPhone a justifiable claim to being a viable gaming platform.”

SEGA seems to be very happy with the sales of their popular Super Monkey Ball game for the iPhone so they will certainly develop more games for the iPhone in the future.

Xbox 360 online gamers should definitely pick up the iXboxLive iPhone application that lets you check all your Xbox Live friends while you’re not sitting behind your console. The app lets you see what your friends are playing, what their Reputation is, it shows their Gamer Score and what their location is. The problem is that you can’t send messages to your Xbox Live friends. iXboxLive costs only $0.99 and was developed by Nicholas Pike.